Correcting ph of mash water containing proper ion amts

So I have read a few books and I am new to brewing (go figure). I have looked/searched this site for a while and cant seem to find the best way to correct ph in water. It seems to be a consensus that incorrect ph is a symptom of poor water ions. My local water supply is not great for my style (aipa) so I am planning on using arrowhead water (popular bottled water on the west side) ions corrected with salts for my particular brew. How best do I fix ph for my mash in and my hot liquor tank (for sparging) to brew?
Approx ion content
Ca - 90
Mg - 8
SO4 - 207
Cl - 46
CO3 - 81
Na - 10
pH ~ 7
And does that look decent for a strongly hopped ipa? Thx for any help.

The water pH does not matter, only the mash pH. That water profile doesn't look too bad for an IPA. I notice that the ions don't balance. It appears that there probably isn't any carbonate or bicarbonate in that water to get it to balance. I don't know if that the bottled water is free from bicarbonate, so I can't comment if the profile is factual as posted or as I've assumed. I can tell you that its very unlikely that there is much carbonate in the water if the pH of the water is in the typical 6.5 to 8.5 range. It would mostly be in the form of bicarbonate, not carbonate.

I recommend you download and read Bru'n Water for some additional guidance on brewing water chemistry.

Enjoy!

Yeah...i mis typed. HCO3 (Bicarbs) levels are around 81 ppm.

With 81 ppm HCO3, the indicated profile does not balance ionically. There is a bit of a disconnect in what is presented.

I can confirm that the sulfate concentration should be fine for an IPA. I typically use about 300 ppm.

unseenat17 said:

It seems to be a consensus that incorrect ph is a symptom of poor water ions.

Click to expand...

No, it is improper grist composition for the water. The major villain in this is bicarbonate (alkalinity) in the water. Sometimes it is there and the brewer doesn't do anything to neutralize or remove it. Sometimes the brewer follows bad advice and exacerbates it.

unseenat17 said:

How best do I fix ph for my mash in and my hot liquor tank (for sparging) to brew?

Click to expand...

1) Get the alkalinity level of the water down to a respectable value
2) As this by itself usually (but not always) is not sufficient - add acid in some form (sauermalz, sauergut, lactic, hydrochloric, sulfuric, phosphoric acid)

unseenat17 said:

Approx ion content
CO3 - 81

Click to expand...

That can't be carbonate so it's either bicarbonate or alkalinity "as Calcium Carbonate". In neither case is it terribly bad and a bit of acid should do the trick. In British brewing a mix of sulfuric and hydrochloric is traditional but as you can't readily obtain those in food grade in the US lactic or phosphoric is the usual choice.

Yes, I made a mistake with co3...i meant hco3. It is pretty high in bicarbs

mabrungard said:

With 81 ppm HCO3, the indicated profile does not balance ionically. There is a bit of a disconnect in what is presented.

Click to expand...

Im hard to say I dont understand what you mean by 'not balance ionically' any furthet info would be greatly appreciated.

1) Get the alkalinity level of the water down to a respectable value

Click to expand...

If I just use distilled instead of arrowhead which would contain no carbonates at all since I have the salts to obtain proper ions...would this work out better for my purpose?

unseenat17 said:

Im hard to say I dont understand what you mean by 'not balance ionically' any furthet info would be greatly appreciated.

Click to expand...

The concept of ionic balance refers to the fact that in an aqueous system, the amount (referred to as 'equivalents') of the positive ions (known as 'cations') have to equal the amount of negative ions (known as 'anions').

The predominant cations in freshwater are: calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. The predominant anions in freshwater are: bicarbonate, chloride, and sulfate.

The problem with a lot of brewing mineral calculators is that a user can enter any values for their existing water profile and they think that its alright since the calculator doesn't indicate a problem. Bru'n Water includes a much more comprehensive review of the water profile that the user enters for their local water. That review includes a check on the 'ionic balance' of the water profile. It helps uncover errors in testing, reporting, and transcription that could lead the brewer down the wrong path. If you want to be more sure of what you're doing with your brewing water, Bru'n Water is going to get you much closer to the truth.

PS: Bru'n Water also includes a comprehensive presentation of this brewing water chemistry 'stuff' that will better answer your questions.

unseenat17 said:

If I just use distilled instead of arrowhead which would contain no carbonates at all since I have the salts to obtain proper ions...would this work out better for my purpose?

Click to expand...

Many brewers do use low ion water - probably more use RO which is low but not as low as DI (which is ion free except for a bit of bicarbonate which it picks up from the air but this is a very small amount despite what Al Gore and his buddies tell us). The reason they do is that this gives the ultimate in control over the ion profile. One can emulate anything nature can produce (i.e. ionically balanced) but it is often much simpler to just follow a nominal set of additions.

mabrungard said:

The concept of ionic balance refers to the fact that in an aqueous system, the amount (referred to as 'equivalents') of the positive ions (known as 'cations') have to equal the amount of negative ions (known as 'anions').

Click to expand...

Ok, that makes a lot of sense. So as an example, if i had distilled water with a +2 charge cation ion in it, a -1 charge anion would not balance it...i would need two -1 charge anions right?

If you have a reported imbalance that doesn't mean something is wrong with the water. It means there is something wrong with the report. You will never be give a sample that actually has an imbalance - it can't exist*. There is no such thing as distilled water with a +2 cation charge and a -1 anion charge.

The reason Ward Labs (and other labs) give the anion and cation numbers is so that you will have an idea as to the quality of the particular report you are looking at. For every sample they analyze mEq of cations and mEq (per liter) of anions should be exactly equal. There are several reasons a report may not balance. The obvious one is that each measurement that a lab does is subject to some error i.e. no measurement is perfect. Beyond that, for example, Ward Labs uses some unknown (to me anyway) means of calculating carbonate and bicarbonate which is not correct. In one of their reports which appeared in a relatively recent thread the alkalinity was 118 and the pH 8.3. Those are the things that they measure. Bicarbonate and carbonate are calculated from alkalinity and pH. The reported alkalinity and pH yield bicarbonate content of 139.5 mg/L and 1.3 mg/L carbonate at 25 °C. At 20 °C the numbers are 139.7 and 1.2). But Ward Labs reports 132 and 6. Given that bicarbonate carries a single charge and carbonate a double charge this error obviously will result in an incorrect calculation of the anion content. An interesting twist on this is that in the particular report I looked at here the error in carbonate/bicarbonate cancelled error from other sources so the reported Ward Labs balance was actually better than the actual balance calculated assuming all the measurements were correct. Thus a poor balance guarantees poor quality report but a good balance does not guarantee (but strongly suggests) a high quality report.

Other things can cause a report to be imbalanced. For example neglect of some ion that is present in appreciable concentration. Strontium is a good example of this. Some waters carry strontium levels up to 10 mg/L. Neglecting this would introduce an error of 0.1 mEq/L. Note that the usual hardness tests would respond to the strontium but it would be misinterpreted as calcium or magnesium whereas an AAS test wouldn't pick it up at all unless a separate AAS test were done for it).

A common problem where the report is coming from a water authority is that the reported data come from samples taken at different times or the reported numbers are averages. A detailed report on any given sample of water should balance. There is no reason to expect that values determined from different samples should.

One other comment: In pure water the charges are E-7 moles/L H+ and E-7 moles/L OH- (at 25°C) and the pH is 7 . There are no other anions or cations in pure water. 18 megohm distilled or otherwize deionized water is close to this. If the pH is at any other value than 7 something has been added to the water. The usual culprit is CO2 gas from the air. Lab "DI" water will usually have a pH of near 6. The H+ ion content is 10 times higher than is fresh DI water i.e. the H+ charge is +E-6 but this is balanced by -E-6 negative charge from bicarbonate ion.

*There are frivolous exceptions to this e.g. a beaker of DI water placed for some time on the ball of a Van de Graff generator. Even here the charge would dissipate as soon as the generator was turned off.

But when brewers add salts (like in my case) it throws the water off balance. In such a case...something must happen naturally for it to balance. What happens? This is starting to get interesting

It doesn't. Neutrality is inviolable. In solving brewing water chemistry problems we simultaneously solve 6 equations one of which says that the sum of all ionic charges must be 0. I suspect that what you may be seeing is that a spreadsheet tells you the ion balance shifts when you add some salts. With salts like calcium chloride there are exactly 2 negatively charged chloride ions added for each doubly positively charged calcium ion. If you add a millimole of calcium chloride to water you get a millimole of calcium and 2 of chloride and that's all there is to it. If a spreadsheet shows an ion imbalance when a salt like calcium chloride is added it is seriously flawed and I doubt that's what you are seeing.

When the salts of a weak acid or the weak acid itself are added the situation isn't so straight forward. Each molecule of sodium bicarbonate contains 1 positively charged sodium ion and 1 negatively charged bicarbonate ion but when this is added to a solution some of the bicarbonate converts to neutrally charged carbonic acid and some to doubly charged bicarbonate. To calculate how much shifts to each we must know the pH of the solution after the addition was made. To find out what the new pH is we compute the ion concentrations (using 4 of the equations mentioned above) and from them the imbalance at each of several pH's (pH is referred to as the "master variable"by water chemists) chosen by some iterative method like a root finder or linear programming algorithm such as Excel's Solver until we find the pH that gives balance. So your intuition that something happens to restore the balance is spot on. What happens is that the pH changes to the point where the redistributed charges balance.

As you can probably appreciate accounting for this complicates a spreadsheet appreciably which is why most don't do it. If a spreadsheet does not ask you about what the initial and post addition (target) pH's are that is a clue that it is not modeling weak acids or their salts properly. In such cases you cannot expect ion balances to be correctly computed unless you avoid additions of acids such as phosphoric and carbonic and their salts. Hydrochloric, sulfuric and lactic acids are strong enough that you don't have this problem with them.